IBM RS/6000 unsuitable for news

[Tom Fitzgerald]

bglenden at colobus.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes:
> In my opinion, IBM/RS6000 machines running AIX 3, are unsuitable for
> running usenet news because the filesystems only have 4k blocks, and
> thus waste a lot of space for usenet news. (Also, the number of inodes
> is fixed, which would be painful if we could drop the block size...).

It depends on how much you want to spend on disk....  The machine we're
using here also has 4 Kb block sizes, and yah, it wastes about 40% of
the disk.  (It fills up at about 180 Mb used out of 300 Mb allocated).
It's worth it to us because it's available - 120 Mb of wasted space is
cheaper than a whole new machine.

It helps a lot to throttle back the expiration time of talk.*, alt.flame,
etc., since the median article size for those groups is lower than the
median article size for comp.* and news.*.

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Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz at wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz